Having delivered himself of this retort, Lord Charles then announced that he would call a Press conference at his house, and that, after giving details of the Prince’s private life, he would resign his commission and go to live in France with his wife.
The Prime Minister, who had previously been told that Lady Brooke was willing to withdraw from court for a time but that the Prince would not allow anyone to approach her on the subject, was now informed that a temporary withdrawal had after all been approved. He was, therefore, able to draft letters which both the Prince and Beresford felt able to accept, Beresford merely placing on record that ‘circumstances had occurred which led Lady Charles Beresford and her friends to believe it was [His] Royal Highness’s intention publicly to wound her feelings’; the Prince putting his signature to a denial that he ‘had ever had any such intention’, and to a regret that ‘she should have been led to conceive an erroneous impression upon the point’.
The Prince was not disposed, however, to forgive the Beresfords yet. On hearing in March the next year that the troublesome letter had at last been burned, he told Lady Charles’s brother-in-law, Lord Waterford, to whose care it had been entrusted, that he could never forget and would never forgive her conduct nor that of Lord Charles. ‘His base ingratitude, after a friendship of about twenty years’, had hurt the Prince more than words could say. It was not until June 1897, when the King’s horse, Persimmon, won the Ascot Gold Cup that he was prevailed upon to speak to Lord Charles again; and even then he felt impelled to write immediately to Lady Brooke to apologize for having done so.
My own lovely little Daisy [his letter ran], I lose no time in writing to tell you of an episode which occurred today after you left — wh. was unpleasant and unexpected — but I hope my darling you will agree I could not have acted otherwise, as my loyalty to you, is I hope, a thing that you will never think of doubting! — Shortly before leaving Ascot today, Marcus B. came to me, & said he had a gt. favour to ask me — so I answered at once I should be delighted to grant it. He then became much affected, & actually cried, & said might he bring his brother C. up to me to offer his congratulations on ‘Persimmon’s’ success. I had no alternative but to say yes. He came up with his hat off, & would not put it on till I told him, & shook hands. We talked a little about racing, then I turned and we parted. What struck me more than anything, was his humble attitude and manner! My loved one, I hope you won’t be annoyed at what has happened, & exonerate me from blame, as that is all I care about.
Throughout the final stages of the distressing Beresford affair, the Princess of Wales, although naturally upset that her husband’s passion for Lady Brooke had led him to become so reckless a champion, had stood by him as loyally as she had done during the Gordon Cumming trial. Knollys told the Prime Minister’s private secretary that the Princess was even more angry with Beresford than the Prince, that she warmly supported her husband ‘in everything connected with this unfortunate affair’ and was ‘anxious to do all in her power to assist him’.
Comforted by this support, the Prince was also consoled by Lady Brooke, who, on her father-in-law’s death in December 1893, became the Countess of Warwick. The Prince was still passionately in love with her, gazing at her longingly, so she afterwards claimed, giving her numerous little sentimental presents and tokens of his affection, writing to her regularly. And despite the warning administered to him by the Mordaunt case, he wrote her far more intimate letters than any he seems to have composed for other women, addressing her as his ‘darling Daisy’, his ‘own adored little Daisy wife’. ‘He wrote me a letter twice or three times every week,’ she said, ‘telling me everything that had happened to him. He expected me to write frequently, and if I didn’t he used to say I had hurt him.’
In Lady Warwick’s subsequent accounts of their relationship, she makes him appear far more in love with her than she was with him, describing him once as having been ‘bothersome as he sat on a sofa’ holding her hand and ‘goggling’ at her. Six years after the Prince’s death, she told the journalist Frank Harris, ‘He was remarkably constant and admired me exceedingly … He had manners and he was very considerate and from a woman’s point of view that’s a great deal … He was indeed a very perfect gentle lover. I think anyone would have been won by him … I grew to like him very much.’
By then Lady Warwick had become a dedicated socialist; and she liked to emphasize the part she had played in interesting the Prince in worthy causes, being at pains to point out the taste they shared for the simple pleasures of country life. She said that he had advised her ‘against giving expensive entertainments’ and had added that, for his part, he was much happier to come down to Easton Lodge to see her quietly with a couple of friends. All the same, they had both enjoyed house-parties on the grand scale; and she had spent a great deal of money in giving them. One of them, attended by the Prince, lasted a week, the guests being transported by a special train which ran from London and back every day; and actors being engaged to play the parts of chessmen in the gardens, arrayed in fantastic costumes.
At Easton Lodge house-parties, according to Elinor Glyn, who lived nearby at Durrington House and often attended them, those with a taste for sexual intrigue and illicit liaisons found their hostess an ever-willing and resourceful collaborator, always careful to warn her guests that the stable yard bell rang at six o’clock in the morning, thus providing them with a reliable alarm in case they had to return to a previously unoccupied bed.
In the staircase hall, Mrs Glyn wrote,
there was a tray, on which stood beautifully cleaned silver candlesticks … one of which you carried up to your room, even if you did not need it at all. It might be that in lighting it up for you, your admirer might whisper a suggestion of a rendezvous for the morning; if not, probably on your breakfast tray you would find a note from him, given by his valet to your maid, suggesting where and when you might chance to meet him for a walk … Supposing you had settled to meet the person who was amusing you in the saloon, say, at eleven, you went there casually at the agreed time, dressed to go out, and found your cavalier awaiting you. Sometimes Lady Brooke would be there too, but she always sensed whether this was an arranged meeting or an accidental one. If it was intended, she would say graciously that Stone Hall, her little Elizabethan pleasure house in the park, was a nice walk before lunch, and thus make it easy to start. Should some strangers who did not know the ropes happen to be there, too, and show signs of accompanying you on the walk, she would immediately engage them in conversation until you had got safely away.
Once the intending lovers had come to an understanding, it would usually be agreed that something would be left outside the lady’s bedroom door to signify that she was alone and that the coast was clear; but a pile of sandwiches on a plate, formerly a favourite sign, had fallen into disfavour since the greedy German diplomat, Baron von Eckardstein, seeing some in a corridor at Chatsworth, had picked them up and eaten them all on the way to his room, much to the consternation of the countess who had placed them there.
These clandestine arrangements were perfectly acceptable to the Prince, of course, provided there was no hint of scandal or even of open discussion of what everyone knew was going on. Discretion was insisted upon as de rigueur, disclosure unforgivable. A gentleman’s behaviour was not to be measured in terms of his sexual activities but by the strictness with which he observed the rules that polite society imposed upon their conduct. Certain practices were not to be tolerated. On hearing reports that Lord Arthur Somerset, the superintendent of his racing stables, had been apprehended by the police in a homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street frequented by Post Office messenger boys, the Prince had at first refused to believe it of a friend of his ‘any more than [he would have done] if they had accused the Archbishop of Canterbury’. He had sent emissaries to the Commissioner of Police, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Prime Minister in an effort to clear Lord Arthur Somerset and to get ‘something settled’. The Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions was informed by these emissaries that the Prince was in a ‘great state’ but that he ‘didn’t believe a word of it’. It was, as the Prince told Lord Carrington, ‘simply inconceivable’: if Somerset were guilty of such an offence, who on earth could they trust? Finally he was forced to conclude that Somerset, like anyone capable of such behaviour, must be an ‘unfortunate Lunatic’ and the less one heard ‘of such a filthy scandal the better’. But, aberrations like this apart, a gentleman’s infidelities were his own affair so long as he kept them to himself and did not allow them to become the subject of public discussion. This being understood, lovers who had spent part of the night together were expected next day to betray not the least hint of their previous intimacy.